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Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Why I swtiched to Cuil

Like everyone else, I noticed the huge discussion about the launch of Cuil. Even though the initial response was not favorable, I decided to give it a try. It is now my default search engine for two reasons, privacy, and they made it easy to put it on my Firefox search bar. I also like the visual presentation of the search results, it is very cool to the eye.ReadeWriteWEb examines how Cuil got such a spectacular launch. From a PR point of view, two things interest me; first of all, do people really care about privacy? How many will choose Cuil just for privacy protection. This will be an excellent test of the market power of privacy marketing.

The other thing that interests me is their methodology If Cuil catches on the whole science of search engine optimization will become passé. No longer will we worry about disgruntled elements dirtying up our clients' search results, and no longer will we be gaming search results. That would be a very positive thing.

My experience was quite different. The first search I did on a fairly mundane topic (docbook) returned on the first page a number of both relevant and useful results. Many of these were not on the first few Google pages. I haven't tried to hook it up with Firefox yet, but will. I too am watching the privacy aspect to see how much, and by whom else, that is appreciated.

It gives me only 11 results, with pictures I don't need, scattered all over the screen. Who needs that? With Google, I can fly through a list of 100 results and rapidly see which ones are relevant or not. I'm sticking to Google.